How to Even…Deal With Difficult Coworkers Without Ending up in Prison

By Michael Gushue & CL Bledsoe

Coworkers are like family: you’re stuck with them, unless you want to become homeless and starve. And, just like family, there are many types of coworkers, with their positives and negatives. There’s the Turtle, who keeps their head down and does their work without any interaction. These are really the gold star worker, so bully for you if that’s you. There’s the Raccoon, who is always sticking their nose into other people’s business and digging through their trash with their human-like front paws. Raccoons are good for passing the time, since they tend to be chatty, but they are also often less reliable. And they smell like trash. Probably the worst coworker is the Chihuahua. This coworker is annoying, confrontational, and more self-assured than they should be. There are more types, but these are the most common. Unfortunately, shittiness is a spectrum, and any of these types could be difficult to deal with.

Scenario One

Let’s run a scenario. Meet Greg. He’s a chihuahua. Greg couldn’t pass the physical to be a hall monitor, and he’s never forgiven the world. Greg has a manbun and a goatee, but it’s not fooling anyone. Greg is the kind of person who dies on every hill he comes to, and his annoying little corpses are strewn all around the office. Unfortunately, you have to work with Greg on a project. There’s no chance of you getting out of it. You’re going to be working closely with him for the foreseeable future. So how will you survive?

Drown Him in Details

Greg once got lost in a detail in 1996 and spent six years wandering the woods and glens before finally emerging, blinking and smelly in the dimmed light of a post-911 world. Ever since then, he’s secretly hoped to go back to the simpler, microscopic world of detail. So why not make that dream come true? Drown him in a sea of details. Break every little thing down into as many component pieces as you possibly can. It will thrill his wheedling little soul.

You may be thinking that you’ll frustrate Greg or upset him in some way with all these details. Unfortunately, no. Details are a war he will always win. He will, in fact, appreciate them, the more there are. But you can distract him long enough to get the actual work done, if you’re smart about it. That means less time spent with him. The downside, here, is that you’re going to have to work more closely with him, but that’s better than dealing with him going behind your back to your boss every five seconds. It will be every 10 seconds, now. Maybe every 15, if you’re lucky. The one thing to avoid with this strategy is actually talking to Greg about anything. Once you do, Greg will take you into a demonic world where every detail leads to two smaller details which he will describe to you, down and down and down, until you are lost in The Detail Maelstrom that is Greg’s brain, paralyzed and tossed to and fro like a rag doll in a tornado. After you escape — IF you escape — it will take hours for you to start functioning again, with relapses occurring for the next few weeks.

Fake an Illness or Death

Longtime readers of How To Even know what fans we are of faking one’s own death, it’s almost always the smart move. We’ve done it, ourselves, a total of six times. (Seven if you count that year CL spent following Phish, a kind of living death.) You might not have to go that far, though. If you’ve got enough sick leave, you can simply call out on SL until Greg gets lost in some other project and forgets about yours. Or, you could take another approach. Contract a highly contagious illness and then cough in Greg’s face. If you don’t know where to contract an illness, try hanging out with some little kids, or anti-vaxxers. You’ll be sick before you know it. Honestly, as soon as you show up in Greg’s office coughing, sneezing, and/or bleeding from your eyes, he’ll probably cancel the meeting immediately and spray the place down with hand sanitizer. Or, he’ll go work from home for a week, which at least means you don’t have to look at him.

Scenario Two

Here’s another scenario. Victoria bathes in perfume. When flies get within two feet of her, they crash to the ground in sneezing fits. Victoria also never stops talking. One imagines she’d die of thirst because she doesn’t stop talking long enough to take a drink, but she somehow absorbs enough water vapor from the air to survive. What does Victoria talk about? No one really knows because all her co-workers have developed a survival mechanism of reducing her talk to a constant flow of wordless burbling. Except you.

They’re doing some repair work in your office, and you have to sit by Victoria for a few days, possibly weeks. You move your things to the desk beside hers. It’s already covered with her overflow junk. The air is so thick with her perfume, scented lotion, and the slight undertone of brimstone, that your eyes water and you immediately begin sneezing before you even make it to your seat. She’s already started talking, and she wants your advice on a hat she’s thinking of buying. She has seventeen options pulled up on her desktop. How will you survive the constant sensory onslaught without drowning her in a toilet?

Drown Her in a Toilet

Sometimes, the only way out, is through. We kid! We kid. Drowning your annoying coworker in a toilet seems like a great solution, but consider this: who will clean up the mess? An underpaid contract worker, probably. And what if she’s not dead? Then, they have to deal with interacting with her. What did they do to deserve that?

Out-Ostrich Her

How do you do this? Two words: Ax Body Spray. You know they make that stuff in candles, now? And if she wants to talk all the time, tell her about your itchy pelvis. Or that weird discoloration between your toes that won’t go away. Or that time you had a dream your dog was humping your leg to completion, but instead of your dog’s face, it had Abe Vigoda’s face and was singing “How, how, how,” from ZZ Top’s “La Grange” over and over. Too much? Yeah, that last one might be too much. Maybe don’t ever tell anyone about that, not even a therapist. They have to sleep nights, just like the rest of us.

The Reasonable Path

We imagine that some of you are reading this, thinking, “Hey, what should I have for lunch?” The answer is, “Probably a sandwich.” That’s always the answer. And some of you are reading this and thinking, Hey, maybe you guys are taking this all a bit too far. How about just communicating with Victoria? Meeting her halfway. Ask her to tone it down with the perfume, for example, and the talking. Okay, let’s do that. How will Victoria react? Let’s assume you were super-polite about it, explained that her stank (a word you definitely don’t use) gives you a headache that lasts basically until you get home. At that point, you’re exhausted from trying to work through it all day. Your clothes reek, so you have to actually wash them regularly now (maybe skip that bit of info, also). Basically, you try to appeal to her better nature. Does it work?

No, of course not. She doesn’t have a better nature. If she did, she would’ve considered the olfactory warfare she’d been waging before now. She just wants her little smelly smells, and that’s all that matters. And now, you’ve offended her. She’s going to complain about you to the team lead, make snide comments about how you smell or look, and generally give you the cold shoulder, which, actually, that part of it is okay. Although this may take the form of her talking about you constantly without actually to you. You’ll be “Some people” who “are so rude” and have “the nerve” to “insult women about.” Welcome to hell. Regardless, she’s going to act like you’ve personally attacked her, and she’s going to be unreasonable about it. So, basically, drowning her in a toilet isn’t so bad of an option now, huh, except for the cleanup. The best plan here is to catch her as she’s leaving for the day, when she’s making a stop on the way out. We won’t go into details, this is one of those times where improvisation works best. Pretend you’re Nicolas Cage in Vampire’s Kiss. That should help.

Scenario Three

Here’s a third scenario. You take a job at a new place, only to discover that your boss is a real piece of work. Very high maintenance, childish. What do you do?

The problem, here, is that your boss thinks of themself as an alpha, and they think that means they can and should treat you like dirt. You need to disabuse them of this notion. How?

Kidnap Their Pet

Whoa, whoa, whoa, don’t get ahead of us. Now, take into account that this person is a piece of shit, so the pet is probably better off with you. Also, we didn’t say anything about hurting or in any way mistreating the pet. It could be like a doggie/kittie/monitor lizardie spa situation. The biggest problem is going to be returning the pet, after.

Takeaway

The lesson here is that you should’ve been born rich, so you don’t have to actually work for a living. This is pretty much always the takeaway. A slightly less important moral would be that you could very literally die without a good job, since your healthcare is tied up in it. Also, your housing and ability to feed and support yourself. So you’re stuck with assholes like Greg until the invention you’ve been working on in your garage pans out. Or explodes, killing you and obliterating everything in a three-block radius. Either one works.